The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “Why can’t he?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “Not that I know of. Not in the usual sense. Maybe in your sense.” He taps his temple. “That’s why I need you to talk to him.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’m not quite sure. Father Smith is a remarkable man, a gifted priest, as you well know. He’s always been a role model for me. In fact, he’s gotten me past some bad moments. But—” Again he shrugs and falls silent.

  “I don’t think I understand what the problem is,” I say, wondering whether we’re supposed to be out of earshot of the women and whether they’re waiting for Father Placide. But he speaks in an ordinary voice and pays no attention to the women or to the deacon in the hall.

  “Look, Doctor, you’re an old friend of Father Smith’s, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You know that for years he has lived out in the woods at the hospice near the fire tower and that he has never given up his part-time job as fire watcher for the forestry service.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that I don’t sympathize with him. I mean, how would you like to live here? Ainh?” He opens his hands to the cluttered office and the oval print of the Sacred Heart with a dried-up palm frond stuck behind it.

  “Not much.”

  “Look, Doc,” says the priest, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands. “Look, I’m not the best and the brightest. I finished in the bottom third of my seminary class. I don’t know whether Father Smith is a nut or a genius, or whether he has some special religious calling. It’s out of my league, but I can tell you this, Doc, I need help. Me, I’m not going to be much help to the Lord if they have to peel me off the wall and carry me off, ainh Doc?”

  Father Placide talks in an easy colloquial style, hardly distinguishable from any other U.S. priest or minister, except that now and then one hears a trace of his French Cajun origins. It is when he shrugs and cocks a merry eye, hollow but nonetheless merry, and says ainh? ainh? His three is just noticeably t’ree.

  “I understand, Father. What do you want me to do?”

  “I ask you, my friend, to speak to Father Smith, persuade him to come down and help me out. For just a few weeks.”

  “Come down?”

  “From the fire tower.”

  “In a manner of speaking, you mean.”

  “Not in a manner of speaking, cher. He won’t come down.”

  “Won’t come down from what?”

  “From the fire tower.”

  “Literally?”

  “Literally. He has a man bring up his groceries and empty his camp toilet.”

  “How long has he been up there?”

  “Three weeks. Since the hospice was closed.”

  “Why was the hospice closed?”

  A shrug. “The government. You know, they cut Medicare for hospices but not for Qualitarian centers.”

  “Then is he staying up there as a kind of protest?”

  A big French shrug, eyes going left, then right. “Who knows? Maybe, but it’s more than that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He told me that he had—ah—discovered a mathematical proof of what God’s will is, that is, what we must do in these dangerous times.”

  “I see.”

  “Now, he may be right. It’s out of my league. Me, I’m a very ordinary guy and have to baptize babies and run the school and suchlike. I’d like to preach the good news of the Lord, but it seems like I don’t have the time. Ask him if he can take off a little time from saving the world to help one po’ li’l priest.”

  “All right, Father.”

  “One more little thing—” He is shuffling papers on the table.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m supposed to be organizing an ecumenical meeting here—” He sighs. One more thing to do. “I got to find five of our laymen who are willing to—Would you be interested?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okeydoke,” says the priest absently, unoffended, shuffling more papers. Is he looking for something else I can do? I get up.

  The doorbell rings. Mrs. Saia starts out from the meeting. Father Placide jumps up. “I’ll get it, Sarah! Hold the fort.” I think he is avoiding the meeting.

  While Father Placide is gone, I am wondering how best to get out of here. The front door is blocked by the deacon, who likes to talk. I find myself remembering that during the race riots here years ago I once escaped through the ducts of the air-conditioning system. Now I remember. I used St. Michael’s sword to unscrew the Phillips screws of the intake grille of the air-conditioner—to escape during the riots.

  One of the ladies is saying, “—and I heard that he wouldn’t even come down when he had a heart attack and wouldn’t let anybody come up to treat him except Dr. Gottlieb. And the only reason he let him come up was that he, Father Smith, had converted to the Jewish religion.”

  “Oh no,” says Mrs. Saia sharply. “He’s peculiar, but he wouldn’t do that. I know him well—after all, he lived here. Peculiar, yes. Why, you wouldn’t believe—”

  Ernestine Kelly breaks in with her low-pitched but querulous voice. I can see her sweet, sad face. “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this on good authority because I know the people it happened to. Both desperate cases. One had a tumor of the womb which was diagnosed as malignant. The other, a close friend of mine, had a son working for Texaco who fell off a rig during a hurricane. After three days the Coast Guard gave up on him. Both of these people had the same impulse the same night, the exact same time, to get up and go for help from Father Smith. They did. Of course they couldn’t get up the tower, so they both wrote their intentions on notes and pinned the notes to the steps of the tower. The very next day the first person’s tumor had gone down—the doctors could not find a trace of it—and the other person’s son was found clinging to a board—for three days and three nights.”

  Jan Greene snorts. “For God’s sake. Like Jonah. I mean, really. Has it ever occurred to anybody that he might be up there for a much simpler, more obvious reason?” Her voice is impatient, even ill-tempered. I can see her lean forward in her chair, eyes flashing, face thrusting like a blade.

  Silence, then Ernestine Kelly’s injured voice: “Are you suggesting miracles cannot occur?”

  “I am not. But why not look for simpler explanations?”

  “Hmph. Such as.”

  “Such as the tumor was a fibroid and went down spontaneously—they often do. The boy’s life was preserved because he hung on to the raft or whatever. And Father Smith could be staying up there for the oldest reason in the world.”

  The other women wait. Finally someone says, “What’s that?”

  “He could be doing vicarious penance for the awful state of the world. It is, after all, good Catholic practice,” says Jan sarcastically. “The Carmelites and the Desert Fathers have been doing it for centuries. This really slays me. Here we are on the very brink of World War Three, on the brink of destruction, and nobody gives it a second thought. Well, maybe somebody is. After all, how do you think the siege of Poitiers was lifted? How do you think Lucca was saved from the Black Plague in the fourteenth century?”

  Hm. Poitiers? Lucca? Nobody knows how they were saved. The Desert Fathers. The other ladies are floored. But not for long. “I still say—” tolls Ernestine, her voice a soft little bell.

  Father Placide is back. “Sorry, Doc. Another dharma bum. Trying to get out to California. Looking for a handout. One more thing, Doc—”

  “Look, Father,” I say, lowering my voice, “I think those ladies are waiting for you to run the meeting. Hadn’t you better—”

  Father Placide laughs. “You kidding, cher?” For once he does lean close and almost whisper. “Me run that gang? I don’t tell them. They tell me.”

  “Well—” I stand up. “I have to see Father Smith.”

  “Good luck, ma fren,” says Father Placide, shaking
hands, hollow-eyed but merry. “Tell Simon to phone home.” He laughs. Tired as he is, he doesn’t seem to bear a grudge.

  “I will.”

  Dan—yes, that’s his name—looks up from his index cards as I pass and addresses not me, it seems, but there’s no one else in the hall.

  “Why make it complicated?” he says, not quite to me and not quite as a question. “It’s just a cop-out. There is such a thing. He quit, period. Who wouldn’t like to quit and take to the woods? But somebody has to do the scut work. Some people—” he says vaguely, and goes back to spinning his Rolodex.

  “Right,” I say as vaguely as I close the door.

  6. THE FIRE-TOWER ROAD winds through a longleaf-pine forest to a gentle knoll perhaps fifty feet above the surrounding countryside. Beyond, fronting a meadow, stretches a spacious low building with a small central steeple, which looks stuck on, and far-flung brick wings. The building looks deserted. The meadow is overgrown. Half a dozen Holstein cows graze, all facing away from the bright afternoon sun.

  There is a single metal utility shed straddled by the legs of the tower, fitted with two aluminum windows. A chimney pipe of bluish metal sticks through the roof.

  Not a soul is in sight. I roll down the Caprice window and listen. There is no sound, not even cicadas. No breeze stirs the pines, which glitter in the sunlight like steel knitting needles.

  Getting out, I walk backward, the better to see the tower. It is an old but sturdy structure of braced steel, perhaps a hundred feet tall. The cubicle perched on top looks like a dollhouse. One window is propped open. Shading my eyes against the sun, I yell. My voice is muffled. The air is dense and yellow as butter.

  A bare hand and arm appear at the window. It is not a clear gesture. It could be a greeting or summons or nothing. I will take it that he is waving me up. I climb a dozen steep flights of green wooden steps smelling of paint. Presently the crowns of the longleafs are beside me, then below me. The heavy shook sheaves of needles, each clasping a secret yellow stamen, seem to secrete a dense vapor in which the sunlight refracts.

  Thumbtacked to a post at the foot of the tower are three cards, two ordinary business cards and an old-fashioned holy picture of the Sacred Heart, each with the scribbled note: “Thanks for favors granted.” On the metal upright of the tower I notice several penciled crosses, like the plus signs a child would make.

  The stairs run smack into the floor of the tiny house. The trapdoor is open. Father Smith gives me a hand.

  I haven’t seen him in months. We were both in Alabama, he almost next door on the Gulf Coast at a place named Hope Haven for impaired priests, mostly drunks. I used to attend his Mass, not for religious reasons, but to get away from Fort Pelham, the golf course, the tin-roofed rec hall, the political arguments, and the eternal stereo-V.

  He has aged. He still looks like an old Ricardo Montalban with a handsome seamed face as tanned as cordovan leather, hair like Brillo, and the same hairy futbol wrists. His chest is a barrel suspended by tendons in his neck. Emphysema. As he pulls me up past him, his breath has an old-man’s-nose smell. But he is freshly shaven and wears a clean polo shirt, unpressed chinos, and old-fashioned sneakers.

  He is different. It comes to me that the difference is that he is unsmiling and puzzled. He inclines his head to the tiny room. The gesture is not clear. It could mean make yourself at home.

  Home is exactly (I find out) six feet square. He is more than six feet tall. I see a bedroll against the wall. I reckon he sleeps on the floor catercornered.

  The room is furnished with a high table in the center, two chairs like barstools, in one corner a chemical toilet, and nothing more. Mounted on the table is a bronze disk azimuth, larger than a dinner plate, fitted with two sighting posts and divided into 360 degrees. The four sides of the cubicle are glass above the wainscot except for a wall space covered by a map. Hanging from the map are strings weighted by fish sinkers. Next to the map is a wall telephone.

  Outside, the gently rolling terrain stretches away, covered by pines as far as the eye can see. In the slanting afternoon sun the crowns of the pines are bluish and rough as the pile of a shag rug. The countryside seems strangely silent and unpopulated except toward the south, where the condos and high-rises on the lakefront stick up like a broken picket fence.

  “It’s good to see you, Father.” I offer my hand, but he does not seem to notice. Perhaps he regarded his pulling me up through the trapdoor as a handshake. Then I see that something is wrong with him. He is standing indecisively, fists in his pockets, brows knitted in a preoccupied expression. He does not look crazy but excessively sane, like a busy man of the world, with a thousand things on his mind, waiting for an elevator. Then suddenly he snaps his fingers softly as if he had just remembered something, seems on the very point of mentioning it, and as suddenly falls silent.

  We stand so for a while. I wait for him to tell me to sit. But he’s in a brown study, frowning, hands deep in pockets, making and unmaking fists. So, why not, I invite him to have a seat. He does.

  We sit on the high stools opposite each other, the azimuth between us.

  “Allow me to state my business, Father. Two pieces of business. Father Placide wanted to know how you were and wanted me to inquire whether you might help him out. Dr. Comeaux wanted to know whether you have decided to recommend his purchase of the buildings and property of St. Margaret’s.”

  Again he gives every sign of understanding, seems on the point of replying, but again falls silent and gazes down at the azimuth with terrific concentration, as if he were studying a chess board.

  “Father,” I say presently, “I know you must be upset about the hospice closing.”

  Nodding agreeably, but then frowning, studying the table.

  “I know how you feel about the Qualitarian program taking over, the pedeuthanasia, the gereuthanasia, but—”

  “No no,” he says suddenly, but not raising his eyes. “No no.”

  “No no what?”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “They have their reasons. Not bad reasons, are they? They make considerable sense, wouldn’t you agree? They’re not bad fellows. They make some sense,” he says, nodding and repeating himself several times in the careless musing voice of a bridge player studying his hand. “Well, don’t they?” he asks, almost slyly, cocking his head and almost meeting my eyes.

  “It could be argued,” I say, studying him. “Then are you going to approve the sale to Dr. Comeaux?”

  “Hm.” Now he’s drumming his fingers and tucking in his upper lip as if he had almost decided on his next play. “But here’s the question,” he says in a different, livelier voice—and then hangs fire.

  “Yes?”

  “Tom,” he says, nodding, almost himself now, but concentrating terrifically on each word, “what would you say was wrong with a person who is otherwise in good health but who has difficulties going about his daily duties, that is—say—when he is supposed to go to a meeting, a parish-council meeting, a school-board meeting, visit the nursing home, say Mass—his feet seem to be in glue. He can hardly set one foot in front of the other, can hardly pick up the telephone, can hardly collect his thoughts, has to struggle to answer the simplest question. What would you say was wrong with such a person?”

  “I’d say he was depressed.”

  “Hm. Yes. Depressed.”

  I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t.

  “Were you, are you, able to say Mass?”

  “Mass,” he repeats, frowning mightily. “Yes,” he says at last in his musing voice. “Oh yes.”

  “Could you preach?”

  “Preach.” Again the cocked head, the sly near-smile. “No no.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Why not? A good question. Because—it doesn’t signify.”

  “What doesn’t signify?”

  “The words.”

  “The words of the sermon, of the Mass, don’t signify?”

&
nbsp; “That’s well put, Tom,” he says, not ironically. “But the action does.”

  “Why don’t the words signify?”

  “Let me ask you a question as a scientist and a student of human nature,” he says, almost in his old priest-friend-colleague voice.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think it is possible that words could be deprived of their meaning?”

  “Deprived of their meaning. What words?”

  “Name it! Any words. Tom, U.S.A., God, Simon, prayer, sin, heaven, world.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

  “Here’s the question,” he says in a brisk rehearsed voice. Again, for some reason, he reminds me of a caller calling in to a radio talk show. He almost raises his eyes. “If it is a fact that words are deprived of their meaning, does it not follow that there is a depriver?”

  “A depriver. I’m afraid—”

  “What other explanation is there?” he asks in a rush, as if he already knew what I would say.

  I always answer patients honestly. “One explanation, if I understand you correctly, is that a person can stop believing in the things the words signify.”

  “Ah ha,” he says at once, smiling as if I had taken the bait. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Don’t you see?” he asks in a stronger voice, eyes still lowered, but hitching closer over the azimuth.

  “Not quite.”

  “It is not a question of belief or unbelief. Even if such things were all proved, if the existence of God, heaven, hell, sin were all proved as certainly as the distance to the sun is proved, it would make no difference, would it?”

  “To whom?”

  “To people! To unbelievers and to so-called believers.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Because the words no longer signify.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the words have been deprived of their meaning.”

  “By a depriver.”

  “Right. Once, everyone admits, such signs signified. Now they do not.”

  “How do you mean, once such signs signified?”

  Again he smiles. Again it seems I have fallen into his trap. He rises, stands to one side, hands in pockets making fists. “I’ll show you. Do you see that?” He nods to the horizon.